Born Dolen Marie Perkins to Barbara J. Perkins and James A. Perkins of Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up there. She attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, earning a BA degree. She completed a master's in creative writing from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in English at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she settled as an adult.
Career
Perkins-Valdez has published short fiction and essays in such magazines as The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, StorySouth, African American Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North CarolinaLiterary Review, Richard Wright Newsletter, and SLI: Studies in Literary Imagination. She has also taught at Mary Washington College, and the University of Puget Sound. She is now an associate professor at American University in Washington, DC. Perkins-Valdez has said she was inspired to write her debut novel, Wench: A Novel, after reading a biography of W.E.B. Dubois and coming across a brief reference to the founding of Wilberforce University. It was noted as first being based at the buildings and grounds of a former, privately owned resort called Tawawa House, named for the "yellow springs" in the area. The iron-rich waters were thought to have medicinal value. Among the regular summer visitors to the Ohio resort in the antebellum period were Southern white planters and their enslaved mistresses of color. Wench features Lizzie, a young enslaved woman, and her complicated relationship with her master. It also explores the lives of three other mistresses of color, whom Lizzie comes to know at the resort. They are influenced by spending time in a free state, and seeing free people of color there. It was published by Harper Collins in 2010 and in paperback the following year. The book received positive reviews and notice as a debut novel. The paperback edition became a bestseller. The novel was selected by NPR in 2010 as one of five books published that year that was recommended to book clubs, for "something to talk about".
Other works
In 2013, Perkins-Valdez was invited to write an introductory essay to the 37th edition of Solomon Northup's autobiography Twelve Years a Slave. Her second novel, Balm: A Novel, was published in May 2015. The novel is set in Chicago during the Reconstruction Era. It explores a Tennessee black healer named Madge, who was born free; a white widowed spiritualist named Sadie; and a freedman called Hemp from Kentucky, who gained freedom by fighting with the Union Army. Each migrated to Chicago after the war, along with thousands of others working to rebuild their lives and to explore new kinds of freedom. Perkins-Valdez said that she wanted to "move the story out of the battlegrounds of the war into a place like Chicago taking it out of those traditional spaces such as the South or even thinking of Virginia or Pennsylvania... and putting it somewhere that was absolutely affected by the war but was still, in some ways, peripheral."
